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Talk:Akali/Strategy/@comment-95.87.50.201-20130327121640/@comment-24010081-20140113153213
The biggest problem with Akali jungle is that in order to have an impact in the mid game she needs really badly to be ahead of everyone in XP and Gold. This is because, while she is quite possibly the strongest late-game assassin in the game, her early game damage scales slowly and she is very item dependant. She really relies on being ahead of everyone to make up for her weaker early/mid game burst in comparison to other assassins. Mid lane is her best option (top is second best). She gets enough XP and gold to outscale most junglers and botlane giving her 2-3 potentially easy targets to focus and burst as soon as she hits 6 as well as being equal to mid/top lanes, allowing her to have a fair shake at out-dueling those two lanes 1v1. Being in the middle of the map also allows her to roam easily to wherever she is needed. She can rush Gunblade and gets to take flash/ignite or flash/teleport driving up her kill potential even further and putting her in a position to snowball out of control. Just 2-3 kills combined with decent xp an cs coming out of midlane and she can quickly get out of hand and become unstopable. Coming out of the jungle she needs 2-3 kills just to catch up. In the jungle her early game clear times are such that she is going to wind up at roughly equal level to botlane and below mid/top. She has to pick between ignite and flash and can't take both reducing her kill potential. Also she has less gold overall which is very hard on a item dependant champ like her. She can go Spectral Wraith and eventually catch up thanks to the gold passive, but the mid-game damage boost from it is not nearly as high as from gunblade. Overall less gold and less XP in the early game combined with very poor kill potential on ganks pre-6 leaves her in a rough spot when transitioning into the mid-game. Basically, after many many games of testing her in the jungle with all sorts of builds/runes I've come to the conclusion that it just slows her down too much and lowers her impact on the game. And, while it can be successful, and you can carry with it, it is much easier to do so in mid or even top lane. Meanwhile other jungler options are much more capable of applying early game pressure and/or simply speed farming the jungle, meaning they have more of an impact on both the early and mid games coming out of the jungle than she does. The best build I found was flat AP blues, flat AD quints, flat ad reds, and flat armor yellows. Full 30 points in offense tree. This is b/c early jungle clear damage is mostly auto attacks so fastest clear times can be achieved by a lot of AD and damage boosting masteries. It also increases her spell Vamp, thanks to her passive, letting her sustain a little better. I eventually started taking ignite/smite just to up my kill potential, and still rushing gunblade first, then spectral wraith, just b/c gunblade is such a power spike on her. However, you still need spectral wraith if you want to have a chance of catching up in gold to everyone else. On the plus side her later clear times become incredibly fast, and after you finish spectral+gunblade her jungle sustain is incredible. You can nearly go from 25% hp to 100% off one camp.